Tully Satre’s work is formal, made by prioritizing color, pattern and material. His early paintings were created using a grid of colored tape layered on top of painted canvas. After making less than two-dozen works in this way, he shifted entirely to painting. Instead of using tape he began painting the canvas solid colors, tearing it into strips, and stretching each strip over the stretcher bar, by weaving them together.

Growing up in an Irish-American family, that placed a lot of emphasis on heritage, Satre’s early exposure to colors were those found in tartans, plaid and hounds-tooth. His palette often includes bright reds, blues and greens. He also uses yellow, pink, black, white and gold, relating to his interest in the pop art movement. Satre’s color choices are often highly saturated. He is influenced by the color palettes of Josef Albers, Vincent Van Gogh or Mary Heilmann.

Satre’s first attempts at this work focused on abstraction and color fields, but recent works repeat themes such as flags, crowns, and archetypes. The painted gestural mark in his work is reduced to flat abstract shape and pattern. While studying at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Satre was captivated by the School’s rich history of depicting the figure. He began including imagery from his personal life: his family, friends, lovers, selfies, and the occasional Instagram celebrities in his paintings. Shortly after leaving the RA, Satre arrived in Santiago, bringing with him his continued interest in the human figure in his work.

He was from the sea; I was from the sky at Espacio Andrea Brunson focuses on portraiture and is a more poetic and romantic body of work than any of Satre’s earlier paintings. When looking at these new paintings, I am reminded of Paul Cadmus’ Jerry, a portrait of the artist’s lover, Jared French, and how Cadmus’ work and life fluctuated between exposure and concealment. All of the paintings in this exhibit seem to examine dualities. Titles such as Jose de la rosa, Cristían, Pagano (a famous gay night club in Valparaíso), Erik y Pacino en Bogotá, (the cat around the subject’s shoulders was named after actor Al Pacino), Bentinho (the antihero of the famous Brazilian novel Dom Casmurro), all elude to personal narratives and locales. Each painting deals with polar opposites of abstraction and representation, image and object.

I am also reminded of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, and the portraits of the Dutch Masters. However, Satre’s work is not about capturing an impression or fetishizing a likeness. These paintings are more about abstraction than they are about realism. Satre’s portraits are optical rather than figurative. The three-dimensionality of a human face allows for the illusionistic quality within the painting to shift when it is woven.

The abstraction of these woven portraits resembles the complexity of human personalities. To see the figures’ image blurred and pixelated mirrors how we relate to one another. It is complicated to truly know someone and our perception is always changing, especially today where the line between reality and internet persona is less discernible. This is similar to how the image vibrates when the portraits are woven. It is alive and flat simultaneously. This characteristic is important in Satre’s work because of his interest in duality. Just like a flag can be heroic waving in the air or it can be still, limp and flaccid. A crown can symbolize exaltation and royalty or it can be a façade, a sham. These can be universal symbols or empty shells like a statue.

I associate Satre’s work with politics even though his work is not overtly political. Satre became a youth activist and political figure in the United States, following a premature outing by his school principal. This led to a public disagreement about civil rights with a US Senator. The events were featured in the New York Times, and Satre’s involvement in the struggle for LGBT rights was started at the same time social media began. By the time he was sixteen, Satre was writing for The Advocate, recognized for his leadership in Washington, DC and ended up with a page on Wikipedia. Satre’s life and career have always been processed and documented through the internet and relegated through the computer. These woven portraits are about control, abstraction, form and object. They are an investigation of the self in a digital age.

—Betany Porter is an artist and a curator who lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.